More and more documents are generated using word processors and the like and are stored on memory devices, such as hard drives, floppy disks, compact disks and other mass storage media. Nonetheless, paper and other similar media will continue to be used far into the future. Consequently, there will continually be a need to scan the substance portrayed on such media so that such information may be manipulated on a computer or other like device.
However, the scanning of paper documents to make the content thereon available in a digital environment may be time consuming and costly. In particular, one problem is that the processing of various regions of scanned documents may take a long time requiring the user to wait for the processing of a whole document. Oftentimes, a user may only want to access a portion of the text, artwork, or other region of the scanned document, rather than the entire document such as cases where specific paragraphs of text are sought from a document. However, current users are often forced to wait while scan converter technology analyzes an entire document to determine the specific types of the various regions that may then be processed by various processing pipelines such as optical character recognition pipelines, etc.